Hi everyone.  Polly Tiki here.  Have you ever interviewed your children?  If you haven’t, I strongly suggest you do.  I recently decided to video tape an interview with my oldest son.  I wanted to have what he is like at age 7 on tape because he’s growing up so quickly.  I first formulated about 40 questions.  I grabbed my questions from this great article here.  I then sat him down when he was in a good mood and started asking questions.  It was the most I’ve laughed in ages.  His answers totally threw me for a loop and made me giggle so much I could hardly hold the video camera still.  This interview was such a success, I think I’ll do an interview every year so we can look back and compare his mannerisms, appearance, and thoughts on life through the years.  I also think I’ll let him make up some questions to ask me next time.

After the interview, when I was viewing the footage, I thought that these questions and answers would make a funny layout too.  Here is my layout.

Credits:

Customizable Journaling Cards No.1 by Designs by Lili

Trademark Collab by Lauren Reid and One Little Bird Designs

Conversation Piece by CD Muckosky

Stay There!  Staple Pack by Karah Fredricks

All Sports Alpha by Kate Hadfield

Fonts are Creative Block and Pea Hanzel and Gretel

Ah Summer …

I don’t know about you but I don’t find summer relaxing at all.  My children get up at 6:30am every day.  It does not matter what day of the week it is or whether they have school or not.  The weather is HOT here in California.  Hot weather makes me feel like a slug. I would love to find some shade and curl up with a book and move as little as possible.  However most of my days are spent lugging heavy bags of snacks, wet towels, sand toys, suntan lotion, and other necessities from park to park in my vicinity.  I do this because it is more bearable than refereeing the fights that occur at home if I try to tend to my summer slug-like ways.  I’m usually a hot tired sweaty mess at the end of the day.  Once my children go to bed, I don’t feel like doing much of anything – including scrapping.

Once September comes around and the kids go back to school and the weather cools a little, I feel like scrapping again.  What usually happens is I open Adobe Bridge and stare at the hundreds of pictures I’ve taken over the summer and then madly try to remember what happened in the last three months.  Not anymore.

I stumbled across a great simple website called Oh Life.  You register with Oh Life and it sends you emails asking about your day.  You reply to the email and it creates a daily personal journal for you.  You can change the frequency of the emails, export copies of your journal to your computer, and edit and delete past journal entries.  Every night before I log off my computer, I reply to my daily Oh Life email.

I use Oh Life to remember funny anecdotes, log travels, detail adventures and just document our everyday life.  Sometimes I have photos to go with the entries and sometimes I do not.  I prepare yearly albums for my family.  This year I’m including my Oh Life entries as part of my album.  I love having the details that I wouldn’t have otherwise remembered.  I’ve been documenting our every day with Oh Life since April and am still going strong.  If you like to document your family’s life.  I highly recommend you give Oh Life a try.

Tiki

You know what I love about a good book? I love to immerse myself in the setting, surround myself in the atmosphere. A well told story lays out the scene in a way that the reader can form a mental vision of the people, the places, and even the moods that exist there. This ability to set the scene with descriptives and details is one of the elements that set the brilliant story tellers apart from everyone else.

I’ve been thinking about this same concept in my approach to scrapbooking – my documentation of the who, what, when, where, how, and why that is my life. When I think back through years passed, yes there are major moments and memories – most of which have been heavily recorded through photographs. But there are other details of my life that set the scene for those major memories to play out. For example, there was the old warehouse behind a strip mall that had been converted into a gymnastics center, with pale blue cinder-block walls, worn equipment and chalk dust hanging heavy in the air. This was the scene in which hours upon hours of my childhood  played out, and while I can recount the memories – the beam routines, the seemingly-endless conditioning – I’ve not told the whole story to its fullest potential if I leave out the details of the setting.  Just like the best of stories, our scrapbooks – the stories we want to tell of the lives we have lived – ought to also include those details that will set the scene and fill in the gaps for the reader. 

How?

Well, one easy way to accomplish this is to simply beef up your journaling. Add in those descriptive words; take a few extra lines to set the scene, so to speak.  Don’t limit yourself to two short lines crammed in an itty bitty space if that space is not sufficient to tell the story the way you want it to be told. There will come a day when the aesthetics of the page, or the number of gallery comments and accolades you received will hold very little meaning, but the meaning behind the story will be of infinite value.  In short, give yourself the freedom to journal as needed.

Another way to capture the details would be to consider scrapping those scenes that have set the stage for our stories. For instance, dedicate a layout to the recollection of the various details of your grandparents’ home – the furniture, the spacial awareness, the smells, whatever it is that makes your story complete.  Focus on telling the story with details and imagery that will help the reader feel immersed in the setting. 

However you decide to go about it, consider giving it a try. Not only will the reader be able to glean information he or she would never have been able to know on their own, but these pages may just prove to be invaluable years from now as you flip back through and resubmerse yourself in your own story. Details may not be the easiest thing to put to page right now, but the payoff in the end is all the difference between an okay story and a story that is brilliantly told.

I browsed through the gallery this morning in search of great journaling examples, and I came across this lovely page by Rachel. She did a great job describing the setting – the hot day, the close proximity of the soccer field to the swimming pool. Fabulous! and she managed to get all the necessary details in and still made a beautiful page! This is a great example of working the details straight into your journaling.

I also wanted to show you how easy it can be to simply scrap the scene.  Here’s an example of a layout I did recently that pulls out some of the special details of my daughter’s childhood bedroom.  It’s not overly complicated, but it gives a focused view of some of the details that make up her every-day surroundings.